Crossed Fingers

I wish I could say that a lot is happening at once, but really it isn’t. Rather, we’re getting a lot of hopes up in a short burst. Owen is eating like a champion, alert when he ought to be, and otherwise doing beautifully. We took his carseat so that the nurse could give him his carseat test after we left. So this morning is when we’ll find out if he managed it.

Just in case, she gave us the stuff we’d be taking home so that when he does come home, we’ll have less to carry. We talked about discharge information and watched the inevitably terrifying CPR video. Owen slept through it.

I want to hope that he’ll come home today, but I am so afraid of disappointed optimism. It’s such an irritatingly crippling fear that I feel certain he won’t. Just because that would suuuuuck.

I also had HabitRPG mess up on me again. This time it was a little bit my fault. While I was using the site, I accidentally changed the date on my computer. I changed it back, but it still shoinked my HP, destroyed all of my streaks, and began accusing me of letting all of my habits slip. So that’s fun. I managed to remember my streaks’ numbers (after fixing them so many times, it’s hardly surprising, geez), and I guess I can work my way back through everything else. But it’s still annoying.

It’ll be really nice when this site is working properly more often then ‘sometimes, if you’re lucky’.

My Esperanto studies are going rather well. I’m trying to do vocabulary right now, which is a nice break from grammar. Especially since I’m still trudging through the ancient Ivy Kellerman book. Some of the grammar in that is probably not the done thing anymore, and I caught that at least once. But it’s still a good resource, and it supplements my use of lernu.net well enough. I try to do a lesson a day, so I still have a good… oh probably near forty to go.

It’s not the first time I’ve used this book to study, but it would be the first time I’ve ever finished it–if I do. I shouldn’t say if, but it feels iffy. There is no listing for correct answers to check any translation sections of the lessons, so I fly blind constantly. I definitely read Esperanto better than I translate from English to Esperanto. Dunno if I mind. I think I’d be okay with just reading it.

Still balancing between hoping and trying to manage anticipated disappointment.

Coping

Still not ready to quite get back into my life. It feels wrong to be at home, doing some of the same things I did before Owen was born. Especially since there’s not really a lot of reason to deviate spectacularly from the routine I had right up to that crazy morning. I still have to walk around the flat for ten or fifteen minutes a day, drink lots of water, and do my finger exercises to keep the arthritis at bay. There’s no reason not to resume my Esperanto studies, no reason not to keep reading, playing Freerice, or working on Desiderata.

HabitRPG still helps me keep track of this stuff, although it utterly failed to go into stasis the way it was bloody effing supposed to when I went into labour. I’m still kind of super flipping pissed off about that. Dither went to the trouble of using the “Inn” option to stop it from demanding I keep track of my routine while in hospital. And the site just utterly failed to accommodate. I had to feel awful over the “You died” message, when I had thought I’d taken care of things, and then go about using the restore options peppered throughout the system. None of them should exist as none of them should be necessary.

So I can still get mad. One of the reasons this makes me upset is that it puts into flush relief how bad I feel about life at home looking so peccantly the same.

The only real “additions” to routine at home are the regular times I have to break out the breast pump (giggle or go ‘ew’ here), care for my stitches (I have a lot of them, thanks to a “perfectly normal first-time mother tear”), and put my feet up so that the swelling will go down. It usually doesn’t. And I get to go see Owen twice a day.

I did get to see Owen this morning. He’s back in an open crib, his phototherapy was effective and is now complete. There is an IV in his head because the one in his hand went bad (not as scary as it might sound, mine went bad while in hospital too). He eats well sometimes, this morning he was too sleepy. I don’t think he’ll be home before the 26th. I made hubby laugh today because I said that Owen’s leftovers go up his nose. (whatever he doesn’t eat goes in the feeding tube)

He was wearing cute little monkey rompers today, provided by the NICU. We got pictures with my phone, maybe I’ll find an opportunity to post one or two later today or tomorrow.

First goal: Make it Work!

A couple of days ago, I started using HabitRPG to get myself back into the swing of some things, to stop some bad habits, and to reforge some good ones. It was going well, mostly.

But it’s clearly not ready for use.

There is a mobile version of the site (that barely works) but switching between it and the full version on my computer seems to cause problems. When I logged in this morning, I saw that it had failed to record something I had done yesterday. And then the site went down, which is has been for the rest of the day.

There are different categories of task that the site is meant to track. Habits, which are things you might complete more than once in a day, or not at all. There are some that may be things you are trying not to do anymore, and so you mark them as detrimental to your progress. Some things, you might progress or regress in.

Dailies are things you want to do only once a day. To-Do’s (humorously/idiotically labelled “Todos”) are singular tasks that may even have a due date. Rewards are what you spend your progress points on–instituted as gold and silver coins.

Of course, none of this means anything while the site is completely nonresponsive.

EDIT: Just checked it before publishing (or maybe as I clicked the button, ah well) and the site is currently up. Fast as a paranoid, I clicked all of the dailies I have managed to do in the downtime (which is all of them, geez) and pre-emptively clicked a couple habits that I will now fulfil.

Also, I can now actually put up a screenshot of my personal tasks.

Gamification: Levelling Up My Writing!

Ever since I saw this video about gamification, I have been thinking about ways to apply it to my writing. But for some reason I thought that there was no way that anyone would have figured out a method for that to be put into the realm of novel-writing, so I just pined for it until I rather forgot about it.

Then it started bugging me again.

This morning I did a search while trying to go back to sleep, and came upon an article wherein someone tried to gamify his writing. It linked to an app called Level Me Up. I could be terribly boring in explaining this app, so I’ll just say that it allows you to input a name and icon for the skill you want to level up, and that you gain levels by spending time practising/using those skills.

In the free version, I think you can only have three skills, but I only need to track that many. Novelist, Reader, and Critiquer. Although I’m certainly not on level 1 in any of these skills, I thought it would be best and almost like good sportsmanship to start myself at the bottom and work my way up. Put all of that progress ahead of me.

I spent about an hour going through and critiquing a short story this morning, and am now a Level 2 n00b Critiquer. That’s so fun to say. But that and Reader are both pretty easy skills to codify, or rather, it’s not difficult to say which activities are related to these skills. Novelling is a bit more complicated.

Does brainstorming count? Is writing the only thing that counts? In that case, do I have to finish anything I start or do I have to strike that time from the record?

I’ve also been thinking about things other than just time spent and what counts towards that. Gamification seems to have more than one element to it. What else would make my writing into a game for me? Achievements don’t feel linear enough. Too much like cherry-picking and not getting anything done, like what happens when I run around ignoring the main memory sequence in Assassins Creed 2 in favour of collecting feathers or doing side missions.

While talking to Dither about all this, I think I mentioned quests. But that sounds too much like inserting stale things like writing prompts or exercises. They have value, I’m sure, but I don’t really enjoy them. I feel shackled to doing something I don’t want to or that seems too small for what I want to accomplish.

It’s like being confined to the choices in games like Jade Empire or Mass Effect, with their crazy black and white system of morals. As long as I’m keeping up this game talk.

Granted, I haven’t done a lot of reading on the subject. Just enough to take away something that I had already felt I wanted but didn’t have the language to request.